Friday, May 17, 2013

Study Areas

This
research will take place throughout India, though I will be carrying
out much of my research while being based out of Bangalore, India. I
have chosen to be based here during the research because the current
India Chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation is based here, and their
physical presence allows me better access to their resources as well
as their activities and events. My interactions and co-operation with
the Chapter will help to provide legitimacy to my attempts to engage
the editing community, as well as strengthen my ability to gain
access to the various Indic-language editing communities.

However,
due to the nature of Wikipedia and the Wikipedian community as well
as the various other online communities I may choose to engage, I
predict that the majority of the fieldwork for this research project
will take place in online spaces via online means. Because Wikipedia
itself is an online platform that does not possess one single
specific physical location, its editing communities also exist
predominately in online spaces and tend to be comprised of members
from varying geographical locations. This would make it very
difficult to interact with multiple editing communities in the
physical world; therefore, I plan to use the mailing lists, Village
Pumps1
and community pages of each Indic-language Wikipedia project as a
means to communicate with and engage with each language-specific
editing community. I have chosen these three resources as my
“locations” of research as they are the main sites of interaction
between the members of each community, and are therefore the
principle online spaces where these communities exist.

Further,
as the other online communities that I hope to use as research
subjects are similarly characterized by their online existence, I
will be using each communities' respective mailing list as the main
“locations” of my research.

As
for those data-gathering activities that must take place in the
physical world (such as face-to-face interviews), due to the wide
geographical distribution of the members of the editing communities
in India, I cannot predict the exact locations where the research
will take place at this point in time. However, the locations will
most likely be dictated by the physical location of each editor that
I would like to use as a research subject.

1 A
“Village Pump” is a Wikipedia page that is used to discuss the
technical issues, policies and operations of a specific Wikipedia
project. Most Indic-language Wikipedia projects have their own
Village Pump pages, though Wikipedia India, as it is community of
Indian Wikipedians and not a specific Wikipedia project, does not
have a Village Pump.